Alumni describe the CCS Literature program

Here's a nice description of CCS Lit, written by a group of alumni in 2011. I'd just change a few parts of it; I'll put my notes afterward.

College of Creative Studies Literature Program (founded by literary critic Marvin Mudrick in 1968)

Students are admitted based on work in evidence of talent: poems, short stories, memoirs, and/or essays. Students’ applications are often highly original.

The curriculum concentrates on major literary figures in English and other literatures. There are no lecture, introductory or survey courses in writing or in literature. In English these major figures have always included Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton.

Depth rather than breadth distinguishes the seminars: Readings are close, intense, and ambitious, i.e., it is not unusual that many texts of a single author might be covered in a quarter.

Students approach literature as writers.

Through deep immersion in the works of a single author or a few authors, and instructor-guided close readings, the CCS Lit student refines his or her ability to respond to literature, builds the skills necessary for literary analysis, and gains the knowledge necessary to become an excellent writer.

The notion that the qualities that distinguish good writing are the same across genres—clarity, precision, suppleness of language, vitality of voice, freshness and passion—inform the curriculum and evaluation of student work. The flexible curriculum often includes contemporary or under-represented authors, and works in new genres.

CCS faculty include working poets or writers of fiction, able to serve as mentors to developing writers.

Creative writing courses—the writing of verse, the writing of narrative prose–build the skills of emerging writers in the program but also help students become better readers—more critical and more sensitive to language.

The CCS Literary Symposium offers students continued exposure to a wide range of working writers and is part of the curriculum: speakers have included U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, Pulitzer prize-winning food writer, Jonathan Gold, novelist Maxine Hong-Kingston, playwright Eve Ensler, writer of fiction and documentary film maker Lisa Teasley, and writer of fiction Reyna Grande.

The writerly focus of CCS Lit serves the University as a whole and the English department in particular by nourishing young writers, by serving their literary point of view, and publishing them in Spectrum and Into the Teeth of the Wind.

CCS Lit has served its students well for over 45 years: Graduates have become novelists, poets, lawyers, journalists, playwrights, film and television writers, and scholars, and have been accepted into distinguished and highly selective graduate schools.

In response to "Students’ applications are often highly original" - originality is great of course, but I believe the key is that the application shows a strong enthusiasm for writing instead of just fulfilling writing assignments.

Also, it's likely that "The curriculum concentrates on major literary figures in English and other literatures" was accurate when these alumni were students, but a lot of my Literature classes were on specific movements or themes instead of specific authors.

And there are an increasing number of recent graduates who are technical writers and editors (like me), which is great and worth mentioning too.

More Facebook discussion groups

I haven't been an active CCS Literature alumna recently, but in case anyone is looking for news, rumors, rants, and discussion, here are a few Facebook groups that you might be interested in joining:

• College of Creative Studies - an open group for all CCS students, alumni, faculty, staff, friends, and even prospective students.
• CCS Literature Collaborative - a closed group mostly intended for current Lit students.
• College of Creative Studies, UCSB Literature Alumni - an open group for all Lit alumni, also welcoming current students and friends.
• CCS Student-Alumni Network - an open group with the goal to improve communication between alumni and current students, mostly about the Lit program.
• College of Creative Studies Lit Alumni Mercenaries and Castoffs (1995-2011) - a closed group for recent Lit alumni.

Update: This announcement is why the alumni groups have been active recently:

The Executive Vice Chancellor has requested that the Academic Senate consider a hold on admissions to the Literature major for Fall 2014 in order to provide the time and opportunity to strengthen a cherished and valued program. The recommendation stemmed from an established and carefully considered program review process for academic units of the University of California; the review for CCS was conducted last academic year. The Academic Senate will be reviewing the recommendation and will make a determination on the appropriate next steps. While the process continues, admissions to the program remains open; applications will be read and assessed as normal until the College is informed otherwise. We have been working earnestly to resolve this matter, and will continue to do so. Rest assured that this will not affect any student who is currently enrolled, nor will it affect current students’ ability to complete their degree. As pertinent information is made available, we will post it here.

Also covered in the Daily Nexus.

Mapping the college

Hidden within the CCS website, there's a map of our building (left). I made a new version (right) as part of the in-progress website revision.

I could list the current uses of each room (and the past uses of some of them), but that's not very exciting. Instead, here's some history.

The college folklore is that our building is a "temporary" structure built during World War II as a commissary for the Marine air station that later became the UCSB campus (MCAS Santa Barbara). It seems like normal wartime construction, not intended to last a hundred years, maybe hasty, but pretty durable anyway. Commissary usually means grocery store, but the UCSB Long-Range Development Plan identifies Building 494 as a mess hall. This makes sense, since the book arts lab has old kitchen equipment hookups and a shed with extra sinks. I've heard that the Old Little Theater was a movie theater.

UCSB Geography has a great article about the spatial history of the campus and its department, which includes the following aerial photos (with circles added by me). Compare to the current map of the campus and Google Maps satellite view.

From the UC Library, that's the barracks area of the Marine base, probably photographed sometime between 1942 (when the buildings were constructed) and 1946 (when it stopped operating). It can be seen in context in this 1944 aerial photo of the whole station. According to the California State Military Museum, the station was established here to use the existing Goleta airport for training pilots. (It's no coincidence that there's now a WWII memorial right next to the airport parking lot.)

In the photo, building 494 is surrounded by an orderly arrangement of two-story barracks buildings; a few of them are still standing as buildings 429, 407, and 408. The Old Gym (with the swimming pool on the left) is there too. The tall lines of trees had been planted as windbreaks when the land was a ranch — see this history from the Music department as well as this map from 1888, which is part of a fascinating set of maps of the Goleta slough area. The row of eucalyptus trees along Ocean Road (between campus and Isla Vista) is also an old windbreak — and according to the UCSB LRDP it was "utilized as a gun range that included grenades, bombs, bomb fuses, pyrotechnics, rockets, small arms, and machine gun related ordnance," which is awesome except that the ground may be contaminated.

UCSB moved from its former location (now SBCC) to this spot in 1958. In this 1960 photo, the campus still has most of the old barracks-area buildings, with the addition of the Santa Rosa dorm and some other structures. I'd like to know what that thing is on the other side of the lagoon — that area is now just some crumbling pavement in the grass.

When the College of Creative Studies was founded in 1967, it was housed in the one-story WWII-era building a little north of its present home. In 1975, it moved to building 494 so that an extension to the library could be built on the site of the old place.

The UCSB Long-Range Development Plan's "Sensitivity Study for Potential Historical Resources" says that the few remaining Marine buildings on campus have "low potential to be historical resources" and can be knocked down. Noooooo! These structures aren't beautiful or distinctive, but their presence is educational and adds character to UCSB. They excite curiosity about the history of the campus, they can teach about World War II and the experiences of Marines, they add diversity and interest to the range of structures on campus, and they make students think about the uses and re-uses of places and buildings. I think the CCS home and similar buildings are significant enough to merit working with, not just razing, when planning a future grand avenue and bland dorm complex. (See the "Library Mall" page of the short version of the Campus Plan.) Luckily the UCSB budget probably won't be able to pay for new construction projects for a while.

Update (November 17, 2009):

I've been informed that the mystery structure in the second image is an old lookout tower. Wow!

I've also been learning more about "temporary" WWII construction. Here's a great article from the University of Utah about their similar buildings as worthy of historic consideration. From the article:

The main reason that these structures were labeled "temporary" was due to the general opinion that wars end...These structures were built with the expectation that they would last only 5 to 20 years. However, they have been somewhat over-designed if the objective was to erect temporary structures. President Roosevelt promised the mothers of servicemen that modern facilities and adequate shelter would be provided...a standard of health and comfort previously unknown by U.S. troops during wartime.

The significance of these buildings often lies in their connection to [the whole war effort] rather than as individual buildings...Though few renowned individuals, if any, have graced these buildings' halls, thousands of the unsung did on their way to and from the battlefield.

They are also significant for the way they influenced the building industry. These "temporary" buildings represent a construction methodology that swept the country after the war; that is, standardized plans, prefabrication of components and construction crews that specialized in only one aspect of the construction process.

[For the university's purposes,] costly new construction has often been postponed or even avoided in many instances by simply upgrading these "temporary" buildings with relatively inexpensive modifications such as adding insulation, making them ADA accessible, interior remodeling, a periodic painting, or as has often been the case, moving them to a needed location.

The blog City of Sound discusses another CCS-like building adapted for academic use at MIT (quoting from How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand, one of my favorite books):

"(A) temporary building left over from World War II without even a name, only a number: Building 20...'Unusual flexibility made the building ideal for laboratory and experimental space.'"

"Building 20 was...spartan in its amenities, often dirty, and implacably ugly. Whatever was the attraction?...'One never needs to worry about injuring the architectural or artistic value of the environment'; 'We feel the space is really ours. We designed it. We run it. The building is full of small microenvironments, each of which is different and each a creative space. Thus the building has a lot of personality.'"

Building 494 is a lot like that. You don't have to worry about getting it dirty, and it's full of nicely worn-in rooms that have adapted to their uses. Students are allowed to make many modifications, although we have to ask before doing permanent structural damage (it's a small building, not a huge one like MIT's). City of Sound goes on to discuss the replacement for Building 20, called Stata and designed by Frank Gehry, and how it both continues that tradition of hackability (with careful planning for flexible spaces) and doesn't continue it (because it's a very expensive new building). It'd be nice if CCS had the funds for a replacement building, much less one like Stata, but even then it'd lose something important that Building 494 has.

The Golden Gate National Recreation Area also has a page explaining their preserved WWII temporary buildings. And I found references to a document from 1993 titled World War II Temporary Military Buildings: A Brief History of the Architecture and Planning of Cantonments and Training Stations in the United States, but I don't have access to it.

Pictures of Building 494

I've heard people complain about the odd colors of the CCS building, but this is what it looked like in 2003 (credit to Brendan Barnwell):

I like the colors:

What the college would like us to know

As part of our series of posts learning about Mudrick (see these five descriptions and an alumna's perspective), here's a description of him from the Spring 2008 Literature Symposium announcements, probably written by John Wilson or Caroline Allen [paragraph breaks mine]:

Marvin Mudrick founded the College of Creative Studies in 1967. The existence and survival of CCS have depended on the ideas for education that Mudrick set down after Chancellor Cheadle asked him to "work up an academic plan for this campus." After the Regents approved it, Mudrick ran CCS as its Provost for nearly twenty years. Moreover he taught a literature class and a class in the writing of narrative prose every quarter. 

His classes were exciting, funny, and unlike anybody else's. Besides being a teacher and administrator, Mudrick was a brilliant and prolific writer. He published essays quarterly in The Hudson Review without missing a deadline for over twenty-five years, and most of these essays are collected in his books. But as good as his writing was, his talk was even better. He had the gift of gab and used it. In the classroom, according to Max Schott, Mudrick "took delight in arguing, loved hyperbole, had a propensity for intellectual provocation and irreverence and blasphemy, took pleasure in kicking against the pricks, and was convinced and tried to convince others that talk and the thinking in it (even about serious things, or especially about them) could and should be entertaining." 

Mudrick spoke in this way in a number of CCS symposia: starting with certain notions and improvising as he went along with a lot of wit and a lot of enthusiasm, trying to ignite a feeling for literature and music in others. One of these, an Art Symposium called "Am I Enjoying Myself Yet?" was videotaped in 1985. It will be shown for this symposium.

I enjoyed watching that videotape; it was helpful to hear him speak in his own words.

Also check out the only mention of Mudrick on the college website right now, this dull page titled History of the College of Creative Studies [paragraph breaks mine]:

Planning for the college began in 1965 when Chancellor Vernon I. Cheadle commissioned Dr. Marvin Mudrick, Professor of English, to serve as Academic Planner for the UCSB campus during the academic year 1965–1966. He was asked to propose a long-range academic plan for this campus’ growth. Chancellor Cheadle informed Dr. Mudrick early in their discussions that he was interested in the possibility of a special small college that would serve a part of the student population for which the University, at that time, made no provision.

Dr. Mudrick, who himself entered college at 15, formulated several proposals. Among them was the suggestion for a separate college, independently staffed and administered, with a specially selected and identifiable student body: students who, in addition to meeting UC entrance requirements, demonstrate “talent for original work in an art or science” (CCS Proposal, p. 1). The proposal was approved by the Regents in February 1967 and the College opened in Fall 1967 with an enrollment of 50 students. The College was originally housed in a cramped Marine barracks building next to the library — a relic of WWII when the seaside campus was a military base. The College moved to its present site, still a former Marine barrack, but a larger one, in the fall of 1975.

What another alumna says

Gall and Gumption is an interesting blog by a former Literature student named Kia. She graduated in 1981 and also taught here for a while; she was friends with Marvin Mudrick and is friends with other CCS Lit old-timers like Max Schott. I think some of you are familiar with her name because she's been published in Spectrum several times. She's written several good blog posts about Mudrick, which makes me happy. Learning about CCS history helps me understand why this college is like it is now, which is a useful understanding to have as I try to get the most out of CCS Lit and also try to help make the program better. You probably share my aims and would like to learn more too! Yay!

This 1995 article is a summary of part of CCS history, mostly from a CCS point of view. Here's some relevant background material from it:

Since the college was established as a reaction to conventional undergraduate instruction, there has been tension between the college and some academic departments, especially English.

Some of the bad feeling between the college and the English department has to do with personality conflicts of long standing; some has to do with the approach to literature. The college is interested in teaching students to read carefully and to write well, while the English department is more interested in literary theory.

The external review team found that the college's literature faculty was "extraordinarily inbred," most being former College of Creative Studies students who had received their Ph.D.s from UC Santa Barbara, and recommended that they be replaced by English department faculty.

The literature lecturers disagreed. "It's almost impossible to find people who have enough of a sense of what's going on here to teach here," said Max Schott.

"It is true that we don't spend time talking about intellectual fads like 'deconstruction' and the 'new historicism,'" said Kia Penso, another college lecturer. "Primarily we read the literature and talk about what we have read. But the fact that we don't devote a lot of time to literary theory doesn't mean we are less rigorous."

Kia's blog posts give first-person detail and color to that history. She explains aspects of Mudrick's personality:

The exuberance that so grated on his critics was an urgency of feeling about the richness of this idea as he experienced it, and an impatience with all the phony or less satisfactory notions of the good that just got in the way. Yeah, there are people who laugh at their own jokes because they're nervous and don't know how to be cool. Marvin laughed at his own jokes because he was jubilant, full of high spirits, of energy, of rejoicing in goodness and beauty, in what was out there.

She has ideas that I like:

Which is sort of the point of literature, to give you a more interesting and revealing and rich theory of life and experience (including literature and music, yes) than the half-baked notions we walk about with unthinking.

She also describes her ideas about how to teach reading, which seem to be a decent description of the CCS approach. That approach is one of those controversial things about CCS Lit (note the statement in the above news article that "The college is interested in teaching students to read carefully and to write well, while the English department is more interested in literary theory"), and the success of this approach depends very much on how good the teacher is.

There's an interesting comment on a post criticizing Adam Gopnik, which is one of the posts that I might find interesting (along with this one about riding trains) even if I didn't care about CCS. The comment is about Mudrick's strange appeal:

I went to bed perusing Mudrick on the web-don't even wonder why after all these years his voice is singing high ptched over my shoulder as I read what I type....The thing about Marvin was that you loved him so much despite every reason to dislike him.

I liked reading the second-hand Mudrick advice in some of the posts, reminding me to not worry too much about self-indulgence when writing:

If he read a book on Chaucer he would dispatch it efficiently and then have lots of room to write about Chaucer in a way that considerably increased your pleasure and understanding of Chaucer...The extended inquiry into ideas that you find in one of Mudrick's pieces, the pursuit of the author's presence, the use of jokes as little revelations, all of this sort of thing is self-indulgence...not at all in conformity with that great American virtue of being sparing of words and "sincere" with the few simple ones you use, and in which thinking and inquiring into the ideas that people live by is a frightful piece of presumption.

And to not worry too much about using generalizations when writing and talking:

A generalization was a place from which you launched out into a subject, with the assumption that your observations -- or the observations of other readers in conversation with you -- would correct the generalization. That was what it was out there for, to be corrected, to be filled with content, or to be discarded as not sufficiently descriptive or for any number of reasons that resulted from investigating the questions it raised.

If you're interested in more, I quoted some other people talking about Mudrick in an earlier post. There's also a book called Mudrick Transcribed, but I haven't read that yet.

What one alumnus says

When I was a prospective student, one of the people who convinced me to go to CCS was the popular blogger Tony Pierce ('91), who responded to an email from me:

i told her that i didnt hate any part of [ccs], but that she should be on the lookout for a few things when going into a writing program.

first she should actually try the things that the professors suggest. i had a teacher who hated talking animals, talking inanimate objects, science fiction, anything that wasnt happening right now, or better yet, two hundred years ago.

his theory, though he never said it, was that sci fi, talking animals, and lets say escalators that speak chinese are really things having a conversation, so why not make it easy on yourself and just make those two things People because, especially when youre just a fucking idiot getting drunk for the first time regularilly, getting two people to talk realistically on the page is tough enough.

He's written other things about CCS too:

In 2005: "because there were no grades, no tests, and no finals, i immediately started working at the campus newspaper...where i ended up writing more articles than anyone. blah blah blah. needless to say, my college experience was a magical one and im still very close with the friends that i made there"

To caption that picture from 2002: "i took her past my old college, the glorious fantastic college of creative studies and she said, god thats small, i said, i thought you said size didnt matter"

While discussing The Sopranos in 2004: "the arguement in creative studies is, if youre going to make your character reveal something in a dream, let them reveal it while awake and the consequences are much more interesting, and the effect will be more powerful."

Also from 2004: "i was invited to return back to the greatest classroom ever and sit at the head of the table and teach...they told me the terrible news that the college paper, the daily nexus wasnt good anymore"

He's currently editor of the LA Times blogs.

Marvin Mudrick

The person who founded CCS was an English professor and the Literature program was his baby, which means we're the heart of CCS. Reading about him can help you understand this place a little better.

Jervey Tervalon ('78) talks about learning from him:

Mudrick was fascinated by people, and he loved people in books, and he didn't make a big distinction between the two, except for the fact that you'll know people in books far better than you will know people in life. Here's the advice he gave me: Read literature like we read the newspaper, skim the boring parts, read carefully what interests you — just keep reading. What Mudrick couldn't stand were tastemongers, chasing some intellectual hobgoblin of the modern aesthetic; kitsch culture; the cult of family dysfunction; more about slavery; more about the Holocaust...Mudrick believed writing was a function of reading. If you read with passion and intelligence, you'd eventually come around to wanting to write.

Karen Christensen ('81) also talks about being a Literature major in the Mudrick era:

Mudrick would assign us a new novel every couple of days, and we were asked (though perhaps not expected) to get through piles of Shakespeare (whom he called a misogynist), Chaucer ("just pretend it's horribly misspelled"), and Milton (again, no favorite of Mudrick's).

He said, for example, that the measure of fiction was that it had a human story that would interest anyone, of any age, anywhere. Mudrick believed that students were able to write good stories — really good stories — because, as he said to one class, "you're at the right age, you're still about to get in touch with your own language...[but] you can't write expository prose. You can't write professional prose of any kind, you're not skilled enough yet."

That, for me, is Mudrick's legacy, or at least something he helped to strengthen in me: fascination with the whole of life and a fearlessness about digging into a new bank of knowledge.

From a New York Times review of a book by him:

In several of these essays, Mr. Mudrick seems to believe that the only way to judge a literary work is by the lusty willingness of its heroine or the vigor and explicitness of its sex scenes.

From another New York Times review of that book:

Mr. Mudrick is rude, contentious, incorrigible, comma spliced, headlong, raunchy, scornful and know-it-all...He plays, wonderfully, to the peanut gallery, and we clap so hard our hands and heads fall off, and then we go home and sleep, alas, with Hamlet: if only he weren’t real.

From his University of California memorial, written by CCS Literature professors:

...he reminds his readers that no artistic statement can be separated from the human being who has made it...Like the voices of his favorite authors, the voice in his writing reproduces his own living voice in an almost uncanny way. That voice is cantankerous, loving, aggressive, spiteful, charming; it abounds with energy and fierce humor. His very funny wordplay remains, and his gift for parody as well as his enormous love for, and need for the arts, as though his own life has depended on them.

There were subjects about which he could never be persuaded to alter his opinion, and this represents a weakness in his idiosyncratic approach. Personality was so important to him, the unstinted expression of a strong individuality was so much part of his own critical method, that he sometimes assumed that the personality of an artist lay closer to the surface than it sometimes does.

His capacity to aggravate was great, but so was his genuine pleasure at being opposed by people he liked...some of the College's most spectacular successes have been in areas where Mudrick himself had little expertise — for example in the sciences. This bears out the premise on which his College was founded, that similar qualities of curiosity and independence are necessary in order to excel in any subject.

And a picture.